Adobe Project Firefly: What is it and Why you need it

Adobe Project Firefly is a complete framework to build, deploy custom web apps on Adobe’s Serverless platform.

As a user or enabler of the Adobe Experience cloud products, imagine if you could BUILD (AUTOMATE), MONITOR, MAINTAIN various day-to-day tasks within your Adobe experience cloud login with no dependency on infrastructure, long development cycles or 3rd party products and services!

Some of the Use-cases but not limited to are

Automate daily/weekly i.e recurring reports from multiple data sources
Integrate data for enhanced reporting
Automation to append or Enhance audience profile or segments
Personalisation Use-cases
Create workflows and bots
Centralize documentation, solution design and data dictionary
Create custom apps for business, support and technical teams
Monitor data pipeline and automate alerts

As a data analyst if you spend a good amount of time reporting, wrangling, integrating data from different sources, this technology may be for your team. Read on to understand how this can help in your role.

_{If you are a customer who is using AEP today? some of the uses case (reporting specific) above is achievable within the “Customer Journey Analytics” tool}

Table of Contents

The data/marketing analyst perspective

Adobe experience cloud products enables marketing and data analytics teams to meet various marketing and business goals. These products out of the box are very powerful ,however may not suit all the requirement and keep up with enterprise requirement.

This is where as a data or marketing analyst you may end up building custom home grown solution or use other paid products/service to

Enhance analytics reporting with custom integrations from other source (social, Ad Impression etc.)
Build Custom Dashboard, Reports and Quick analysis using multiple data source
Export analytics data into enterprise data warehouse
Export Adobe analytics data into Business intelligence tool
Export realtime events to marketing automation systems
Steram Adobe analytics data to custom real time dashboards
Enhance Adobe target profile with first or third party data
Enhance Analytics reporting and segmentation with customer attributes

By using project firefly stack you could do most of the above

Without involving internal development and infrastructure teams
Ability to scale in short amount of time
Quick turn around time for changes and updates
Maintain, Monitor all of the custom apps in one place (infrastructure)

The Data Engineer point of view

let’s take a look at how project firefly could benefit data engineers ( or implementation specialist/Developer)in their day-to-day tasks.

A complete design, application and runtime framework to extend the functionality of Adobe experience cloud solutions
Highly secure with API authorization and user access control is offered out-of-the-box.
Monitor all data pipelines for all custom and out of box data integrations
Get alerts on success and failures of data ingestion
Ability to build custom monitoring dashboards and reports
Get access to scalable cloud storage
Ability to automate testing and recurring tasks
No infrastructure dependencies

Here’s a quick look at the Adobe Project firefly Tech Stack.

adobe project firefly introduction — Adobe Project Firefly Technology Stack (source)

Adobe Experience Cloud use cases

Let’s take a look at some of the use cases for adobe experience cloud products to help understand how project firefly could play a role.

Adobe Analytics

Adobe analytics out of box is a powerful tool, it also provides the flexibility to enhance and compliment the data already collected. Some of the use-cases where project firely can add value are

Automate data feed exports
Scheduled Classification for variables
Data Sources auto updates
Custom Attributes automation
Data Pipeline to Cloud/Data warehouse
Analytics Trigger to marketing automation tools

Adobe Target

Adobe target personalisation use cases can be enhanced by using adobe I/o runtime, in addition we could

Automate bulk profile updates
Next page Personalisation use cases
Harness analytics data in adobe target

Adobe Campaign

Enable marketing automation using adobe analytics and adobe campaign to

Trigger Cart/Action abandonment mailer
Trigger confirmation and subscription automation
Automate CRM attributes push to adobe campaign

Adobe Experience Manager

Some of the use cases I could think for AEM are.

Automate asset migration
Migrate external asset to DAM

Custom Dashboard and Insights

The ability to create your own customer platform with dashboard, visualisation and insights in the format that suites the organisation is probably one of the great use of this framework, some use cases include

Custom dashboard with multiple data sources
Real time dashboard from various data source (online, Stores, Kiosk, Branch etc)
Advanced Visualisations
Insight driven reports
Executive dashboards

Adobe Experience Platform

Project firefly could be of great value for AEP use cases, since AEP is built API first you could build custom tools and apps for various AEP tasks.

Data Pipeline Events

AEP provides events for all data pipelines and this could be used to

Monitor data pipeline with custom dashboard
Send success or failure alert to respective teams
Trigger auto retry on ingestion failure

Data Privacy Events

The data privacy events form an integeral part of AEP, this could be used to

Monitor jobs request
Notify teams on request success and failures

Reference and further reading

Project firefly in in developer preview, you can read more and apply here.

Here are some official and other resources to get started

Next set of posts in this series

The next set of posts will cover the following topics and hopefully help you get started with adobe project firefly.

September 11, 2021 adobe-project-firefly

Adobe Project Firefly: Debug, Deploy and Publish app